by
John McFetridge
Monday night I watched the premiere of a new cop show called The Chicago Code. One review I read said that it, “wasn’t a game changer,” but was still pretty good.
Most reviews have been pretty good.
I was interetsed because it covers a lot of the same territory we tried to cover on The Bridge – the complicated stuff about police corruption, politics and how hard it can be to “work the streets.” This appraoch naturally leads to longer story arcs, more serialization and, inevitably, comparisons to The Wire.
So, I was watching The Chicago Code and I was very jealous that they had such a big budget and were able to dig into longer story arcs but there was something missing, something I liked about The Wire that I didn’t see here but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I was sure it was also missing on The Bridge and most (all) other cop shows.
And then it hit me.
All the characters are either cops or criminals.
Well, of course, it’s a cop show, that’s what they’re about.
Crime.
But just crime? My favourite season of The Wire is Season Two – the dock workers. For a lot of reasons, but mostly because those are guys I know well and can relate to. My father was in a union (an installer for the phone company) that was slowly bled dry by the company switching to sub-contractors. I really don’t know if that’s right or wrong in the big picture, I can only see it from my perspective where a lot of social stability and long-term planning that comes from a steady (but let’s be honest, small) paycheck disappeared and a lot of scrambling and insecurity ate away at the working class culture I grew up in.
Of course the dock workers were wrong to get into bed with drug smugglers to try and raise the money to bribe the politicians to get the harbour dredged so the newer, bigger ships could be unloaded there and they could keep their jobs. But I understood their motivations and their feelings that in the big picture what they were doing was small and wouldn’t really make much difference and there we are again, back to The Big Chill and have you ever gone a week without a justification?
But then a woman’s body was found in the harbour and eleven more died in a container on the dock and watching Frank Sobotka get crushed under the guilt was some powerful TV. At times I forgot The Wire was a cop show at all.
(as I was writing this I watched the trailer for Season Two, posted below, and the tag line is Bunk saying, “It’s all about self-preservation, Jimmy.” That’s a nice, clear statement of the season’s theme)
Other people I know prefer the seasons set in the school or the newspaper or “the corners,” but what everyone who likes the show appreciates about it is the big canvas on which it was painted.
The Wire was a game changer because it wasn’t about cops solving crimes, it was about a whole city dealing with a whole city’s problems. There were cops and criminals and politicians, as there are on The Chicago Code, but there were also a lot of people who were just caught up in events – that whole six degrees of seperation.
Bringing in the larger picture is also something that Southland has been pretty good at, though I haven’t seen any episodes of the current season because it’s now on some weird pay-TV channel out of western Canada that I have to pay a lot more for. Oh well, someday on DVD, I’m sure.
So, The Chicago Code is a network show and is trying to move into this ‘bigger canvas’ territory and I’m going to keep watching and hope it gets the freedom from the network to do that. Because if my experience is anything to go by that writer’s room is getting flooded with notes that say things like, “wrap up the story by the end of the episode,” and “have fewer characters,” and “do we really need so many sub-plots?”
And maybe my favourite note, “This needs stronger act outs (which means cliffhangers before every commercial break or viewers wil lose interest) and the beginning of each act needs to be a quick summation of what happened in the last act (because networks seem to think viewers can’t remember what they saw two minutes ago).”
And I wonder if any network note has ever asked what the theme of the season will be?
Showing posts with label The Bridge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Bridge. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
The Gladiator Resort
by
John McFetridge
Steve mentioned the other day that here at DSD headquarters we’re putting the final touches on a collection of short stories we’re calling “Terminal Damage,” and I thought for today’s post I’d put up the first few paragraphs of my contribution, “The Gladiator Resort.”
Some people who’ve read my novels may recognize the name of the resort as a place the bikers were opening up – a resort where in addition to getting a room the customer gets a woman. Of course, that’s too sleazy an idea even for me to make up, it’s based on a real place called The Viking Resort (here’s a link to a review, but be warned, there is adult content, though as usual when the word ‘adult’ is used it means the opposite of adult: http://www.mademan.com/2008/07/vikings-exotic-resort-island-babes-only-3900_31)
And the short story includes some of the characters form my books, JT and Richard Tremblay and makes references to others.
So, I have a question. How do you feel about this kind of loose association between stories and books? Does it add anything or is it just a distraction?
Okay, here’s the beginning of my story:
The Gladiator Resort
The plane was two hours late landing at San Jose, Costa Rica, JT saying they were delayed at JFK, place was locked down, “Somebody probably tried to bring shampoo on the plane.”
Richard looked at the two girls, blondes, maybe in their twenties but probably not yet and JT said, “No, no English, fucking Renzo. But they know the game, the skinny one gave me a blowjob in the bathroom on the plane, she’s good,” and Richard said, okay. He led the way through arrivals to the smaller terminal where the charters left from, saying, “It’s better these days, airports freaking out looking for ragheads with bombs up their ass, it’s a lot better for us,” and JT said, “If you say so, Gramps.”
Yeah, Richard thinking back in the day we needed the long hair and the tats and the colours, the vests and the patches to impress the kids like this JT, the hangarounds and prospects but then going out in the straight world was tough, really drew attention. Now they’d made their move into the bigtime, Richard and a kid like this JT could look like tourists, like fucking bankers. Didn’t even need bikes.
The Costa Rican pilot was waiting by the Cessna and Richard said to JT, “Come with us.”
In the plane Richard lit a joint and passed it to JT who took a hit and offered it to one of the blondes. She took a hit, handed it to the other one and when she went to hand it back to Richard he waved her off and she shrugged and took another hit.
Richard said, “They look like they’ll be okay.”
“Renzo said he’ll have two more next week.”
“Good. We’re booked for months, the place took off way better than we expected.”
JT said the website looked great, “The video is pro.”
Richard said, yeah, guy named Garry made it, real pro, “Real filmmaker, has movies out and everything. He’s going to shoot some pornos at the resort and he wants to shoot a real movie, some kind of indie.”
“Crime story?”
Richard said that would be too much of a stretch, crime at The Gladiator Resort, “What would we know about crime? No, it’s some kind of low budget sci-fi,” and JT said, “Low budget sci-fi with porn chicks, what’s it called Sex-bots in Space?”
Richard said, yeah, sort of, “It’s about this ship that crashes on a deserted planet, a few survivors but they can’t remember anything. The ship was carrying these robots, well not robots, Garry explained it, they’re alive like people, but they were programmed, six women.”
“Clones?”
“I don’t know, maybe, yeah. The ship was on its way to a mining planet so they figure they’re hookers.”
“The chicks do?”
“Yeah, and the guys, there are some guys on the ship, too, Garry and his fucking fag porno,” Richard laughed.
“He’s bringing fags to the Gladiator?”
“He says we should open a gay club.”
JT said, yeah, right.
“Then he tells me there’s a whorehouse in Vegas, you know, outside of Vegas, some Bunny Ranch shit, they’re bringing in guys to service women.”
“Guys’re gonna have to fuck some fugly chicks.”
“Garry said they’re calling them the prostidudes.”
“Nice.”
“But for the movie, I don’t know if he’s bringing fags or porno dudes or real actors, anyway, in the movie they figure they’re delivering these chicks to the mining planet.”
JT said, “We don’t deliver, the guys have to come here,” and Richard said, depends on the price, “You come up with enough cash, we’ll deliver.”
JT said, yeah, thirty minute or its free. “And we’d do a better job than fucking Renzo, we say they speak english, they’d speak english.”
Richard said, I don’t know, we’d say what the guy wants to hear, too. He lit a cigarette and said, “Anyway, Garry says none of the survivors can remember anything, so they’re putting this together with the evidence on the ship, whatever they can find. The computers are busted, so there aren’t any records or anything.”
“And he’s filming this at the Galdiator, I wonder where he got the idea.”
“Yeah, so it turns out the chicks are the ones in charge, they’re the people, and the guys, the men, they’re the robots, or these organic cyborg things, or clones or whatever the fuck and the chicks are selling them as slave labour to the mining company.”
JT said, cool, “Nice twist,” and Richard said yeah, you’d never see it coming. He looked at the blonde chicks, didn’t speak any english and said, “Like they might be in charge,” and JT said, “Yeah, right.”
...
And just for fun, here’s an ad for The Bridge in France:
I really like the way the show starts at twenty to eleven on Mondays...
John McFetridge
Steve mentioned the other day that here at DSD headquarters we’re putting the final touches on a collection of short stories we’re calling “Terminal Damage,” and I thought for today’s post I’d put up the first few paragraphs of my contribution, “The Gladiator Resort.”
Some people who’ve read my novels may recognize the name of the resort as a place the bikers were opening up – a resort where in addition to getting a room the customer gets a woman. Of course, that’s too sleazy an idea even for me to make up, it’s based on a real place called The Viking Resort (here’s a link to a review, but be warned, there is adult content, though as usual when the word ‘adult’ is used it means the opposite of adult: http://www.mademan.com/2008/07/vikings-exotic-resort-island-babes-only-3900_31)
And the short story includes some of the characters form my books, JT and Richard Tremblay and makes references to others.
So, I have a question. How do you feel about this kind of loose association between stories and books? Does it add anything or is it just a distraction?
Okay, here’s the beginning of my story:
The Gladiator Resort
The plane was two hours late landing at San Jose, Costa Rica, JT saying they were delayed at JFK, place was locked down, “Somebody probably tried to bring shampoo on the plane.”
Richard looked at the two girls, blondes, maybe in their twenties but probably not yet and JT said, “No, no English, fucking Renzo. But they know the game, the skinny one gave me a blowjob in the bathroom on the plane, she’s good,” and Richard said, okay. He led the way through arrivals to the smaller terminal where the charters left from, saying, “It’s better these days, airports freaking out looking for ragheads with bombs up their ass, it’s a lot better for us,” and JT said, “If you say so, Gramps.”
Yeah, Richard thinking back in the day we needed the long hair and the tats and the colours, the vests and the patches to impress the kids like this JT, the hangarounds and prospects but then going out in the straight world was tough, really drew attention. Now they’d made their move into the bigtime, Richard and a kid like this JT could look like tourists, like fucking bankers. Didn’t even need bikes.
The Costa Rican pilot was waiting by the Cessna and Richard said to JT, “Come with us.”
In the plane Richard lit a joint and passed it to JT who took a hit and offered it to one of the blondes. She took a hit, handed it to the other one and when she went to hand it back to Richard he waved her off and she shrugged and took another hit.
Richard said, “They look like they’ll be okay.”
“Renzo said he’ll have two more next week.”
“Good. We’re booked for months, the place took off way better than we expected.”
JT said the website looked great, “The video is pro.”
Richard said, yeah, guy named Garry made it, real pro, “Real filmmaker, has movies out and everything. He’s going to shoot some pornos at the resort and he wants to shoot a real movie, some kind of indie.”
“Crime story?”
Richard said that would be too much of a stretch, crime at The Gladiator Resort, “What would we know about crime? No, it’s some kind of low budget sci-fi,” and JT said, “Low budget sci-fi with porn chicks, what’s it called Sex-bots in Space?”
Richard said, yeah, sort of, “It’s about this ship that crashes on a deserted planet, a few survivors but they can’t remember anything. The ship was carrying these robots, well not robots, Garry explained it, they’re alive like people, but they were programmed, six women.”
“Clones?”
“I don’t know, maybe, yeah. The ship was on its way to a mining planet so they figure they’re hookers.”
“The chicks do?”
“Yeah, and the guys, there are some guys on the ship, too, Garry and his fucking fag porno,” Richard laughed.
“He’s bringing fags to the Gladiator?”
“He says we should open a gay club.”
JT said, yeah, right.
“Then he tells me there’s a whorehouse in Vegas, you know, outside of Vegas, some Bunny Ranch shit, they’re bringing in guys to service women.”
“Guys’re gonna have to fuck some fugly chicks.”
“Garry said they’re calling them the prostidudes.”
“Nice.”
“But for the movie, I don’t know if he’s bringing fags or porno dudes or real actors, anyway, in the movie they figure they’re delivering these chicks to the mining planet.”
JT said, “We don’t deliver, the guys have to come here,” and Richard said, depends on the price, “You come up with enough cash, we’ll deliver.”
JT said, yeah, thirty minute or its free. “And we’d do a better job than fucking Renzo, we say they speak english, they’d speak english.”
Richard said, I don’t know, we’d say what the guy wants to hear, too. He lit a cigarette and said, “Anyway, Garry says none of the survivors can remember anything, so they’re putting this together with the evidence on the ship, whatever they can find. The computers are busted, so there aren’t any records or anything.”
“And he’s filming this at the Galdiator, I wonder where he got the idea.”
“Yeah, so it turns out the chicks are the ones in charge, they’re the people, and the guys, the men, they’re the robots, or these organic cyborg things, or clones or whatever the fuck and the chicks are selling them as slave labour to the mining company.”
JT said, cool, “Nice twist,” and Richard said yeah, you’d never see it coming. He looked at the blonde chicks, didn’t speak any english and said, “Like they might be in charge,” and JT said, “Yeah, right.”
...
And just for fun, here’s an ad for The Bridge in France:
I really like the way the show starts at twenty to eleven on Mondays...
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
East Coast - one
By
John McFetridge
I spent most of last year working as a story editor and writer on the TV show The Bridge which is now airing on CTV in Canada and may air this summer on CBS in the US. It’s also been sold to about 70 other countries, so it’ll show up in those places soon, too (I don’t know if the UK and Australia are included or not).
While I was doing that work I had a few ideas for other TV shows and when The Bridge finished production my agent suggested I put together a couple of pitches and we’d take them to producers. So I did.
And we had meetings and we did ‘development’ and we talked and talked and talked but it looks like we’ve taken them as far as we can. My agent has asked me to give it a little longer, so you never know, nature of the buiness and all that, but in the meantime I’ve taken the pilot episode script I wrote for one of the TV show ideas, East Coast, and I reverse-adapted it to a novella that I’m going to serialize here every Wednesday for the next month or so.
Here’s the “one-page” that went out as part of the pitch:
EAST COAST
Sgt. Jerry Northup works to keep his narcotics squad motivated in the seemingly unwinnable war on drugs while at the same time raising three kids with his wife, Isobel.
The USA’s multi-billion dollar war on drugs sent a lot of smuggling up through Canada. The local dealers have stepped up to become a more important – and more powerful – stop on the trip from South America to the big east coast cities of the United States; Boston, New York, Philadelphia.
East Coast is The Wire in a rural and smaller city setting straddling the border; Moncton, Halifax, Bangor, Providence and thousands of miles of unprotected border between them. But the days of the small-town hick are gone. The drug trade brought with it lots of money and organized crime from Columbian cartels to bikers to good old-fashioned mafia.
Like Southland, we’ll also see into the personal lives of the cops. These will be character-driven stories about the deeper effects of police work and crime on the people involved – how the locals get drawn into the more violent world of organized crime and the effects on the families of the men and women charged with fighting crime.
East Coast is about moral dilemmas, it’s about the grey areas between the rules. How far will cops go to catch drug smugglers? Will they use the same methods and the same intensity if the smugglers are international criminals or local fishermen desperate to feed their famies? And what about those locals, how innocent are they, how much have circumstances beyond their control left them in desperate situations and how much is simply greed?
And now, what we called ‘the teaser,’ the bit before the opening credits:
East Coast
one
They called it the New England States-Maritime Provinces Narcotics Officers Drinking Club, a couple hundred cops taking over the entire Days Inn off the I-95 just outside Bangor for the weekend. By Saturday night they had a barbeque set up by the pool, the no glass rule was long gone and the saunas were co-ed. Music blasted, country mostly, a little R’n’B when the Fed from Boston got near the system.
The idea was an informal exchange of information. Rumours, innuendo, which dealers were on their way up, who was bringing in larger shipments, who was the biggest pain in the ass, who was most likely to get killed. All that stuff that couldn’t go in official reports, stuff that wouldn’t ever see the inside of a courtroom but stuff that would be good if the cops on both sides of the world’s longest unprotected border were aware.
In room 202 Staff Sergeant Jerry Northup, the highest ranking RCMP officer on the trip, laid his cards on the table and said, “Even in Canada we call that a full house.”
“You got a lot of time up there to play cards, don’t you?”
Northup pulled in the chips and winked at Sherriff Cousins from Worcecster, saying, “Oh yeah, you know us, we’ve got no crime we just sit around in our igloos practising moose calls and playing poker.”
“You’re in my backyard now.”
Jerry said, you know it, and dealt another hand. The room’s bed had been pushed out into the hall to make room for the table brought up from the restaurant, six cops sitting around it, maybe a thousand bucks would change hands. It was all in fun.
One floor down a naked Constable Evelyn Edwards was on top of a DEA guy from Portland, both of them very close, and her phone started beeping and the DEA guy said, “Whoa, you’re not going to answer that,” and she said, yeah, I have to, “I’m on duty.”
“You’re five hundred miles out of your jurisdiction, you’re in another God damn country.”
She was beside the bed then pulling her phone out of her jeans in the pile of clothes on the floor saying, we couldn’t all get the weekend off, then into the phone, “Edwards... Yes, un-huh, wow, really?” She shook her head and the DEA guy knew they weren’t going to finish any time soon.
Edwards pulled on her sweatshirt and jeans and took off barefoot out of the room saying she’d be back and the DEA guy saw her bra and panties on the floor beside her running shoes and thought, hey, maybe they would finish.
In the poker room Sherriff Cousins was raking in a pot, a big one, saying he knew his luck was going change when Edwards walked in out of breath, all the guys looking at her messed up hair and and she said, “Sergeant Northup,” and Jerry said, “Hey Ev, you looking to lose some money?”
“No sir, it’s about, it’s Superintendent Bergeron.”
Jerry looked at his cards and said, Henry? What now, “Did he lock himself out of the office again?”
Cousins laughed like he knew all about that kind of boss and Edwards said, no sir.
“He died, sir.”
Jerry leaned back in his chair and looked at her. Shit.
Party’s over.
(commercial break)
Part Two is here.
John McFetridge
I spent most of last year working as a story editor and writer on the TV show The Bridge which is now airing on CTV in Canada and may air this summer on CBS in the US. It’s also been sold to about 70 other countries, so it’ll show up in those places soon, too (I don’t know if the UK and Australia are included or not).
While I was doing that work I had a few ideas for other TV shows and when The Bridge finished production my agent suggested I put together a couple of pitches and we’d take them to producers. So I did.
And we had meetings and we did ‘development’ and we talked and talked and talked but it looks like we’ve taken them as far as we can. My agent has asked me to give it a little longer, so you never know, nature of the buiness and all that, but in the meantime I’ve taken the pilot episode script I wrote for one of the TV show ideas, East Coast, and I reverse-adapted it to a novella that I’m going to serialize here every Wednesday for the next month or so.
Here’s the “one-page” that went out as part of the pitch:
EAST COAST
Sgt. Jerry Northup works to keep his narcotics squad motivated in the seemingly unwinnable war on drugs while at the same time raising three kids with his wife, Isobel.
The USA’s multi-billion dollar war on drugs sent a lot of smuggling up through Canada. The local dealers have stepped up to become a more important – and more powerful – stop on the trip from South America to the big east coast cities of the United States; Boston, New York, Philadelphia.
East Coast is The Wire in a rural and smaller city setting straddling the border; Moncton, Halifax, Bangor, Providence and thousands of miles of unprotected border between them. But the days of the small-town hick are gone. The drug trade brought with it lots of money and organized crime from Columbian cartels to bikers to good old-fashioned mafia.
Like Southland, we’ll also see into the personal lives of the cops. These will be character-driven stories about the deeper effects of police work and crime on the people involved – how the locals get drawn into the more violent world of organized crime and the effects on the families of the men and women charged with fighting crime.
East Coast is about moral dilemmas, it’s about the grey areas between the rules. How far will cops go to catch drug smugglers? Will they use the same methods and the same intensity if the smugglers are international criminals or local fishermen desperate to feed their famies? And what about those locals, how innocent are they, how much have circumstances beyond their control left them in desperate situations and how much is simply greed?
And now, what we called ‘the teaser,’ the bit before the opening credits:
East Coast
one
They called it the New England States-Maritime Provinces Narcotics Officers Drinking Club, a couple hundred cops taking over the entire Days Inn off the I-95 just outside Bangor for the weekend. By Saturday night they had a barbeque set up by the pool, the no glass rule was long gone and the saunas were co-ed. Music blasted, country mostly, a little R’n’B when the Fed from Boston got near the system.
The idea was an informal exchange of information. Rumours, innuendo, which dealers were on their way up, who was bringing in larger shipments, who was the biggest pain in the ass, who was most likely to get killed. All that stuff that couldn’t go in official reports, stuff that wouldn’t ever see the inside of a courtroom but stuff that would be good if the cops on both sides of the world’s longest unprotected border were aware.
In room 202 Staff Sergeant Jerry Northup, the highest ranking RCMP officer on the trip, laid his cards on the table and said, “Even in Canada we call that a full house.”
“You got a lot of time up there to play cards, don’t you?”
Northup pulled in the chips and winked at Sherriff Cousins from Worcecster, saying, “Oh yeah, you know us, we’ve got no crime we just sit around in our igloos practising moose calls and playing poker.”
“You’re in my backyard now.”
Jerry said, you know it, and dealt another hand. The room’s bed had been pushed out into the hall to make room for the table brought up from the restaurant, six cops sitting around it, maybe a thousand bucks would change hands. It was all in fun.
One floor down a naked Constable Evelyn Edwards was on top of a DEA guy from Portland, both of them very close, and her phone started beeping and the DEA guy said, “Whoa, you’re not going to answer that,” and she said, yeah, I have to, “I’m on duty.”
“You’re five hundred miles out of your jurisdiction, you’re in another God damn country.”
She was beside the bed then pulling her phone out of her jeans in the pile of clothes on the floor saying, we couldn’t all get the weekend off, then into the phone, “Edwards... Yes, un-huh, wow, really?” She shook her head and the DEA guy knew they weren’t going to finish any time soon.
Edwards pulled on her sweatshirt and jeans and took off barefoot out of the room saying she’d be back and the DEA guy saw her bra and panties on the floor beside her running shoes and thought, hey, maybe they would finish.
In the poker room Sherriff Cousins was raking in a pot, a big one, saying he knew his luck was going change when Edwards walked in out of breath, all the guys looking at her messed up hair and and she said, “Sergeant Northup,” and Jerry said, “Hey Ev, you looking to lose some money?”
“No sir, it’s about, it’s Superintendent Bergeron.”
Jerry looked at his cards and said, Henry? What now, “Did he lock himself out of the office again?”
Cousins laughed like he knew all about that kind of boss and Edwards said, no sir.
“He died, sir.”
Jerry leaned back in his chair and looked at her. Shit.
Party’s over.
(commercial break)
Part Two is here.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
The Good Good Wife
by
John McFetridge
When I first saw ads for The Good Wife I didn’t want to like it.
Partly because it was taking up a valuable CBS timeslot I was hoping the show I was working on, The Bridge, would get and partly because The Good Wife looked like a quickie, ripped-from-the-headlines mess the marketing department came up with.
As usual, I was wrong. The Good Wife is a very good show on the strength of its very strong writing.
If you haven’t seen it, the show is, to quote the official CBS website, “a drama starring Emmy Award winner Julianna Margulies as a wife and mother who boldly assumes full responsibility for her family and re-enters the workforce after her husband's very public sex and political corruption scandal lands him in jail.”
So for a hard-boiled, noir kind of guy like me that’s pretty much every turn-off imaginable. And then, to make matters worse, the job she returns to is as an entry-level lawyer with a big, corporate law firm – about the least interesting, least sympathetic job I can think of, but one TV shows keep doing over and over.
Here, though, the stresses of the job are used to develop the character of the good wife, Alicia, and dig a little deeper. First of all there’s the long hours required for the job. Child care is provided by Alicia’s mother-in-law, a nice complication and another good character as she doesn’t believe her son is guilty of anything, or that if he is certainly Alicia must be to blame somehow. Oh, she never says she thinks Alicia is to blame but those looks and pauses and lack of eye contact between two women who’ve spent time in the same family, involved with the same man in different ways, dealing with the kids – it’s really very good.
At work Alicia is among many first year lawyers and they won’t all get hired on full-time. The other lawyers ar all young, ambitious, well-off and well-educated. Well, have you ever been in a big corporate law firm’s office? Seemed right to me. So Alicia, with two teenage kids at home and a husband in jail is at a bit of a disadvantage. The situation is ripe for cliché but so far the show avoids them with good characterization.
A big issue when writing a TV show these days is episodic vs season-long arc. This came up all the time on The Bridge. The writers want to do season-long arcs and really dig into the characters and situations but the network wants stories that wrap up each episode. CBS told us they wanted it to be episodic but then as the notes started to come in for the scripts they’d be asking for more things that tied into previous episodes.
Everybody must get these notes because these days every show has some longer arcs.
But The Good Wife is a master class in how to write an episodic network series with a season-long arc.
Each episode is its own mystery. And not always a murder mystery, last week’s (not last night's which was a repeat) was about an arson in a science lab, one episode was about an insurance fraud and one was about judicial corruption. Tough stories to make compelling drama, but The Good Wife does it with very good mystery conventions of finding clues and piecing together the puzzle. There was even a murder-mystery story that involved a writer whose wife had a good job and made a lot more money than he did. I can say that a lot of the emotions in that show sure rang true.
And then there’s the longer story arc of the husband’s “sex and political corruption scandal.” First of all there’s the effect it has on the family and then there’s the part where he admits the sex scandal part but denies the corruption and is trying to get a new trial.
The shows ties all this together very well by having the two teenaged kids sneaking around like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys digging up evidence that their dad is telling the truth about being framed for the political scandal.
There’s just enough of this longer mystery to keep me interested week after week but not so many hanging threads that I get frustrated. The weekly mystery being tied up so well helps a lot.
Aspiring TV writers are usually required to write an episode of a current show, a “spec,” as a sample of their work to show producers that they can take on the voice and style of the show. I have a feeling there will be a lot of spec scripts of The Good Wife written this year. It’s a good show to use because the raw material of good characters is already there and it would be a great way to show how you can write a one episode mystery and develop characters. Of course, at the same time it would also reveal any writing weaknesses because the raw material is so good.
John McFetridge
When I first saw ads for The Good Wife I didn’t want to like it.
Partly because it was taking up a valuable CBS timeslot I was hoping the show I was working on, The Bridge, would get and partly because The Good Wife looked like a quickie, ripped-from-the-headlines mess the marketing department came up with.
As usual, I was wrong. The Good Wife is a very good show on the strength of its very strong writing.
If you haven’t seen it, the show is, to quote the official CBS website, “a drama starring Emmy Award winner Julianna Margulies as a wife and mother who boldly assumes full responsibility for her family and re-enters the workforce after her husband's very public sex and political corruption scandal lands him in jail.”
So for a hard-boiled, noir kind of guy like me that’s pretty much every turn-off imaginable. And then, to make matters worse, the job she returns to is as an entry-level lawyer with a big, corporate law firm – about the least interesting, least sympathetic job I can think of, but one TV shows keep doing over and over.
Here, though, the stresses of the job are used to develop the character of the good wife, Alicia, and dig a little deeper. First of all there’s the long hours required for the job. Child care is provided by Alicia’s mother-in-law, a nice complication and another good character as she doesn’t believe her son is guilty of anything, or that if he is certainly Alicia must be to blame somehow. Oh, she never says she thinks Alicia is to blame but those looks and pauses and lack of eye contact between two women who’ve spent time in the same family, involved with the same man in different ways, dealing with the kids – it’s really very good.
At work Alicia is among many first year lawyers and they won’t all get hired on full-time. The other lawyers ar all young, ambitious, well-off and well-educated. Well, have you ever been in a big corporate law firm’s office? Seemed right to me. So Alicia, with two teenage kids at home and a husband in jail is at a bit of a disadvantage. The situation is ripe for cliché but so far the show avoids them with good characterization.
A big issue when writing a TV show these days is episodic vs season-long arc. This came up all the time on The Bridge. The writers want to do season-long arcs and really dig into the characters and situations but the network wants stories that wrap up each episode. CBS told us they wanted it to be episodic but then as the notes started to come in for the scripts they’d be asking for more things that tied into previous episodes.
Everybody must get these notes because these days every show has some longer arcs.
But The Good Wife is a master class in how to write an episodic network series with a season-long arc.
Each episode is its own mystery. And not always a murder mystery, last week’s (not last night's which was a repeat) was about an arson in a science lab, one episode was about an insurance fraud and one was about judicial corruption. Tough stories to make compelling drama, but The Good Wife does it with very good mystery conventions of finding clues and piecing together the puzzle. There was even a murder-mystery story that involved a writer whose wife had a good job and made a lot more money than he did. I can say that a lot of the emotions in that show sure rang true.
And then there’s the longer story arc of the husband’s “sex and political corruption scandal.” First of all there’s the effect it has on the family and then there’s the part where he admits the sex scandal part but denies the corruption and is trying to get a new trial.
The shows ties all this together very well by having the two teenaged kids sneaking around like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys digging up evidence that their dad is telling the truth about being framed for the political scandal.
There’s just enough of this longer mystery to keep me interested week after week but not so many hanging threads that I get frustrated. The weekly mystery being tied up so well helps a lot.
Aspiring TV writers are usually required to write an episode of a current show, a “spec,” as a sample of their work to show producers that they can take on the voice and style of the show. I have a feeling there will be a lot of spec scripts of The Good Wife written this year. It’s a good show to use because the raw material of good characters is already there and it would be a great way to show how you can write a one episode mystery and develop characters. Of course, at the same time it would also reveal any writing weaknesses because the raw material is so good.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
The Bloody Muddle
By
John McFetridge
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of James Crumley. Great stuff. I’d never read Crumley before so I started at the beginning with One to Count Cadence and he was really good right out of the gate. The novel has a great voice.
The one that gets mentioned the most, of course, is The Last Good Kiss and people usually talk about its great opening line, "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon," and the book is full of those kinds of lines.
This one stopped me:
“Stories are like snapshots, son, pictures snapped out of time,” he said, “with clean, hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.”
Now that’s just a great definition of a story – a snapshot with clean, hard edges.
From now on when I think of where to start the story I’ll think about the snapshot with the clean, hard edges. I won’t start the story in the “bloody muddle” before and I won’t keep going out past the hard edge.
It’s a little trickier than just that, of course. The temptation in crime fiction would be to start with the crime and finish with the solution – those would be the easiest clean, hard edges. But most crime fiction, most literature, is trying to be more like life, so there’s probably going to be a little of the “bloody muddle,” a little of the, “big mess,” that is life.
But how much?
It’s always a personal choice, of course, so finding the right balance is part of finding your voice.
On an unrelated note; CBS announced its schedule until the summer and there was no sign of The Bridge.
A news report said:
CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler said the fact that "The Bridge" missed this latest chance to join her schedule is simply a factor of CBS having "more content then we had real estate for." She says CBS has 18 episodes of "Flashpoint" and 13 episodes of "The Bridge" to draw on when a time slot opens up.
The Bridge should air in Canada sometime after the Olympics. It may yet show up on CBS in the summer, or maybe even on a cable network, the way Southland is now on TNT.
Here’s hoping.
John McFetridge
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of James Crumley. Great stuff. I’d never read Crumley before so I started at the beginning with One to Count Cadence and he was really good right out of the gate. The novel has a great voice.
The one that gets mentioned the most, of course, is The Last Good Kiss and people usually talk about its great opening line, "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon," and the book is full of those kinds of lines.
This one stopped me:
“Stories are like snapshots, son, pictures snapped out of time,” he said, “with clean, hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.”
Now that’s just a great definition of a story – a snapshot with clean, hard edges.
From now on when I think of where to start the story I’ll think about the snapshot with the clean, hard edges. I won’t start the story in the “bloody muddle” before and I won’t keep going out past the hard edge.
It’s a little trickier than just that, of course. The temptation in crime fiction would be to start with the crime and finish with the solution – those would be the easiest clean, hard edges. But most crime fiction, most literature, is trying to be more like life, so there’s probably going to be a little of the “bloody muddle,” a little of the, “big mess,” that is life.
But how much?
It’s always a personal choice, of course, so finding the right balance is part of finding your voice.
On an unrelated note; CBS announced its schedule until the summer and there was no sign of The Bridge.
A news report said:
CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler said the fact that "The Bridge" missed this latest chance to join her schedule is simply a factor of CBS having "more content then we had real estate for." She says CBS has 18 episodes of "Flashpoint" and 13 episodes of "The Bridge" to draw on when a time slot opens up.
The Bridge should air in Canada sometime after the Olympics. It may yet show up on CBS in the summer, or maybe even on a cable network, the way Southland is now on TNT.
Here’s hoping.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
It's All Been Done Before
by
John McFetridge
These days I feel like we’re living in a golden age of crime fiction – there’s so much of it and it’s so good.
I remember all too well in the 70’s and early 80’s when all we had was Robert B. Parker and Elmore Leonard.
Now, it’s great to be a reader of crime fiction but as a writer one thing we hear a lot is that everything’s been done before. How to keep it fresh?
I like stories that use real events as a jumping off point to imagaine what led up to the pivotal moment.
Fiction has always done this, of course; James Ellroy and his own mother’s murder (and the Black Dhalia case and many other Hollywood crimes of the 50’s), Richard Price took the story of a woman who claimed her kids were abducted when she was carjacked and wrote a fantastic novel, Freedomland, and Elmore Leonard sat in with Squad Seven – the homicide detectives – in Detroit and wrote a great article about it for Detroit Magazine and also quite a few excellent crime novels.
With so many books and TV shows set in the world of crime and investigation these days there’s bound to be some overlap. How many times have we seen the same ‘ripped from the headlines’ story show up as a Law and Order and a CSI and a Cold Case?
One of the saddest things about late twentieth century life for me was realizing that there are so many similar serial killers there really are only a couple of profiles repeated over and over – and the victims are almost always children or young women. It gets us angry to think about it, but there’s not much to say. So many writers try to make these conventions ‘fresh’ because there’s no depth to the characters, no insight to bring to the stories. There was nothing in Ted Bundy’s life that wasn’t in a million other guys’ lives, nothing we could have changed, no rule or law or even social convention that would have made a difference to him.
We always run the risk of simply exploiting these tragedies.
So how do we tell the same stories in new ways? (I think as long as these things go on in our world literature is still one of the best ways to try and understand).
For myself I prefer stories that stay as true to what really happens in our world as possible. The writer puts it in a meaningful context in a unique voice.
Here’s what got me thinking about this:
This week I saw an episode of Flashpoint that has a very similar climactic scene to one we have in an episode of the TV show I work on, The Bridge. And it’s a scene that’s been done in lots of other shows and books and movies.
There’s a bad guy (really bad, a serial killer on Flashpoint and a guy who’s killed some cops on The Bridge) who isn’t remorseful at all and there’s a cop who has gone bad (been driven to the brink by injustice and more concern for the rights of the bad guy than any compassion for the victims, something like that) and is going to kill the bad guy.
Other cops show up and there’s a stand-off.
It’s good vs. evil, it’s civilized people vs. barbarians.
Yes, the bad guy is bad, but we don’t execute him without a trial in a public square. We have laws and procedures. People have given their lives to protect those laws, they’re what make us civilized. It isn’t some other bad guy threatening to kill him, it’s officers of the state, people we’ve trained and entrusted with our security and the upholding of our laws and institutions (on Flashpoint they made it personal – the ‘bad’ cop was the sister of one of the killer’s victims. We made it a little personal on The Bridge, too, the ‘bad’ cop was the long-time partner of the cop the bad guy killed. And the cop who went bad was a widower who had pretty much joined the family of the cop who was killed).
So what happens?
Do the “good” cops shoot the “bad” cop or let him shoot the bad guy?
I don’t think it matters how many times it’s been done before or how much you want to make this situation different, new or fresh, or whatever you want.
I also don’t think your personal political views matter, or what you wish would happen.
What matters, to me, is what would really happen in that situation with the characters that you created and put there.
And what happens in the Flashpoint ending is very different than what happens in The Bridge ending.
John McFetridge
These days I feel like we’re living in a golden age of crime fiction – there’s so much of it and it’s so good.
I remember all too well in the 70’s and early 80’s when all we had was Robert B. Parker and Elmore Leonard.
Now, it’s great to be a reader of crime fiction but as a writer one thing we hear a lot is that everything’s been done before. How to keep it fresh?
I like stories that use real events as a jumping off point to imagaine what led up to the pivotal moment.
Fiction has always done this, of course; James Ellroy and his own mother’s murder (and the Black Dhalia case and many other Hollywood crimes of the 50’s), Richard Price took the story of a woman who claimed her kids were abducted when she was carjacked and wrote a fantastic novel, Freedomland, and Elmore Leonard sat in with Squad Seven – the homicide detectives – in Detroit and wrote a great article about it for Detroit Magazine and also quite a few excellent crime novels.
With so many books and TV shows set in the world of crime and investigation these days there’s bound to be some overlap. How many times have we seen the same ‘ripped from the headlines’ story show up as a Law and Order and a CSI and a Cold Case?
One of the saddest things about late twentieth century life for me was realizing that there are so many similar serial killers there really are only a couple of profiles repeated over and over – and the victims are almost always children or young women. It gets us angry to think about it, but there’s not much to say. So many writers try to make these conventions ‘fresh’ because there’s no depth to the characters, no insight to bring to the stories. There was nothing in Ted Bundy’s life that wasn’t in a million other guys’ lives, nothing we could have changed, no rule or law or even social convention that would have made a difference to him.
We always run the risk of simply exploiting these tragedies.
So how do we tell the same stories in new ways? (I think as long as these things go on in our world literature is still one of the best ways to try and understand).
For myself I prefer stories that stay as true to what really happens in our world as possible. The writer puts it in a meaningful context in a unique voice.
Here’s what got me thinking about this:
This week I saw an episode of Flashpoint that has a very similar climactic scene to one we have in an episode of the TV show I work on, The Bridge. And it’s a scene that’s been done in lots of other shows and books and movies.
There’s a bad guy (really bad, a serial killer on Flashpoint and a guy who’s killed some cops on The Bridge) who isn’t remorseful at all and there’s a cop who has gone bad (been driven to the brink by injustice and more concern for the rights of the bad guy than any compassion for the victims, something like that) and is going to kill the bad guy.
Other cops show up and there’s a stand-off.
It’s good vs. evil, it’s civilized people vs. barbarians.
Yes, the bad guy is bad, but we don’t execute him without a trial in a public square. We have laws and procedures. People have given their lives to protect those laws, they’re what make us civilized. It isn’t some other bad guy threatening to kill him, it’s officers of the state, people we’ve trained and entrusted with our security and the upholding of our laws and institutions (on Flashpoint they made it personal – the ‘bad’ cop was the sister of one of the killer’s victims. We made it a little personal on The Bridge, too, the ‘bad’ cop was the long-time partner of the cop the bad guy killed. And the cop who went bad was a widower who had pretty much joined the family of the cop who was killed).
So what happens?
Do the “good” cops shoot the “bad” cop or let him shoot the bad guy?
I don’t think it matters how many times it’s been done before or how much you want to make this situation different, new or fresh, or whatever you want.
I also don’t think your personal political views matter, or what you wish would happen.
What matters, to me, is what would really happen in that situation with the characters that you created and put there.
And what happens in the Flashpoint ending is very different than what happens in The Bridge ending.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Two Posts for the Price of One
In lieu of a longer, one-themed approach, I’m opting for two shorter ones today.
Sgt. Pepper Moments
On Wednesday, my colleague, John McFetridge, wrote a fantastic article about a Sgt. Pepper Moment he and the other writers for his show, “The Bridge,” had earlier this year (and get a load of the kick-ass trailer for "The Bridge). As they were writing episodes for “The Bridge,” another cop show, “Southland,” premiered and challenged them in new and unique ways. The entire post is well worth reading.
I got to thinking about my own Sgt. Pepper Moments. These would be moments in my life where I experienced something that completely changed an aspect of my life. I’m not going down the ultimate Sgt. Pepper Moment (being a dad), but, rather, staying on topic with mystery and crime fiction. As I wrote in my bio for this blog, I’m a late comer to the crime fiction genre. I’m here because of a Sgt. Pepper moment. I can state it in two words: Mystic River. Up until its publication, I rarely gave mysteries a glance. Heck, I didn’t even realize there was a distinction between “mystery fiction” and “crime fiction.”
That changed in 2001. After listening to an NPR interview (you'll need RealPlayer to hear it) with author Dennis Lehane, I decided to give the book a try. It rocked my world. I had no idea that a book--a *mystery* book--could be so profound. It changed the course of my reading and my interests. It spoke to me in ways I didn’t know existed. I’ve read it three times now, and I return to it when I need to be reminded how a modern master of storytelling demonstrates his craft.
What are your Sgt. Pepper Moments that got you to start reading mystery and crime fiction?
CSI and the Case of the Recurring Story Line
I have watched CSI on Thursday nights since the beginning. Yeah, Grissom’s gone but Sara’s back...again (Jorja Fox, the Brett Farve of television?). It’s almost back to normal. But there’s a new twist in this season’s storytelling. Have you picked up on it? In the premiere, there was Main Case (the lady in the traffic accident) but there was also the John Doe who arrived at the ME. For the bulk of the show, I expected the John Doe to relate (miraculously!) to the Main Case. The episode ended without a link. Hot dog, I thought, are the writers actually going to have a thread that runs through more than one show?
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy and appreciate the Crime of the Week, but lots of times, I want the longer, deeper mystery ("The Wire" anyone?). Come episode two, John Doe made another appearance...and he still wasn’t solved. Way to go, writers. Heck, the closing scene of the program all but indicated something very peculiar going on in the Vegas crime lab. I have my suspicions about Lawrence Fishburne’s character (my wife doesn’t share them). We’ll see how it turns up. Suffice it to day, what CSI has started doing this season is making me want to tune in. In book speak, it’s making me want to turn the pages. Fast.
Are y’all liking CSI so far this year? Do you like their approach to the storytelling? If not, what mystery/cop show do you like and why?
P.S. Coffee
This weekend only, Starbucks is launching it's new instant coffee, Via, in stores. You can go and take a taste test and see if you can identify the instant coffee vs. the brewed coffee. I could smell the difference and the taste was just further evidence. My reward (and yours if you try it): a coupon for a free cuppa joe. For instant, Via was not all that bad, easily the best tasting instant coffee I've ever had. Still, I'm a brew man, myself. But I can't wait for that next camping trip...
Sgt. Pepper Moments
On Wednesday, my colleague, John McFetridge, wrote a fantastic article about a Sgt. Pepper Moment he and the other writers for his show, “The Bridge,” had earlier this year (and get a load of the kick-ass trailer for "The Bridge). As they were writing episodes for “The Bridge,” another cop show, “Southland,” premiered and challenged them in new and unique ways. The entire post is well worth reading.
I got to thinking about my own Sgt. Pepper Moments. These would be moments in my life where I experienced something that completely changed an aspect of my life. I’m not going down the ultimate Sgt. Pepper Moment (being a dad), but, rather, staying on topic with mystery and crime fiction. As I wrote in my bio for this blog, I’m a late comer to the crime fiction genre. I’m here because of a Sgt. Pepper moment. I can state it in two words: Mystic River. Up until its publication, I rarely gave mysteries a glance. Heck, I didn’t even realize there was a distinction between “mystery fiction” and “crime fiction.”
That changed in 2001. After listening to an NPR interview (you'll need RealPlayer to hear it) with author Dennis Lehane, I decided to give the book a try. It rocked my world. I had no idea that a book--a *mystery* book--could be so profound. It changed the course of my reading and my interests. It spoke to me in ways I didn’t know existed. I’ve read it three times now, and I return to it when I need to be reminded how a modern master of storytelling demonstrates his craft.
What are your Sgt. Pepper Moments that got you to start reading mystery and crime fiction?
CSI and the Case of the Recurring Story Line
I have watched CSI on Thursday nights since the beginning. Yeah, Grissom’s gone but Sara’s back...again (Jorja Fox, the Brett Farve of television?). It’s almost back to normal. But there’s a new twist in this season’s storytelling. Have you picked up on it? In the premiere, there was Main Case (the lady in the traffic accident) but there was also the John Doe who arrived at the ME. For the bulk of the show, I expected the John Doe to relate (miraculously!) to the Main Case. The episode ended without a link. Hot dog, I thought, are the writers actually going to have a thread that runs through more than one show?
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy and appreciate the Crime of the Week, but lots of times, I want the longer, deeper mystery ("The Wire" anyone?). Come episode two, John Doe made another appearance...and he still wasn’t solved. Way to go, writers. Heck, the closing scene of the program all but indicated something very peculiar going on in the Vegas crime lab. I have my suspicions about Lawrence Fishburne’s character (my wife doesn’t share them). We’ll see how it turns up. Suffice it to day, what CSI has started doing this season is making me want to tune in. In book speak, it’s making me want to turn the pages. Fast.
Are y’all liking CSI so far this year? Do you like their approach to the storytelling? If not, what mystery/cop show do you like and why?
P.S. Coffee
This weekend only, Starbucks is launching it's new instant coffee, Via, in stores. You can go and take a taste test and see if you can identify the instant coffee vs. the brewed coffee. I could smell the difference and the taste was just further evidence. My reward (and yours if you try it): a coupon for a free cuppa joe. For instant, Via was not all that bad, easily the best tasting instant coffee I've ever had. Still, I'm a brew man, myself. But I can't wait for that next camping trip...
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Southland and the Sgt. Pepper Moment
by
John McFetridge
The story goes that when the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper and the Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in June 1967 every other musician working on an album stopped and reconsidered everything they were doing. The Rolling Stones quickly put together Their Satanic Majesties Request, often called the least representative album of all the Stones’ work (I still like “She’s a Rainbow,” but that’s the only song from that album anyone’s likely to hear these days).
One version of the story is here, if you're interested:http://www.icons.org.uk/theicons/collection/sgt-pepper/features/reactions-to-sergeant-peppery
Apparently Brian Wilson was working on the album Smile for the Beach Boys (the follow-up to Pet Sounds) when he heard Sgt. Pepper and stopped everything. Smile finally came out in 2003.
This year I was one of the writers on a new cop show, The Bridge, when Southland premiered.
We had a Sgt. Pepper moment in the writers’ room.
Not as drastic as Brian Wilson’s, no one put a sandbox in their living room (as far as I know) and we finished writing all our scripts on time, but Southland was different enough from other cop shows on TV and similar enough to The Bridge for us to talk about non-stop every day after an episode aired.
There are a lot of things about Southland that to talk about. The look of the show is incredible, especially for a network show – it looks like a cable show and it sounds like one, with plenty of the dialogue bleeped out (of course the difference between a cable and network show is more than just swearing, nudity and fewer viewers). The subject matter is terrific. It’s not just the usual cop stories of bad-bad guys and flawed cops. It’s not a procedural interviewing witnesses and getting lab reports until the crime is solved. It goes deeper into everyone’s lives – cops and criminals and victims and people just caught in the middle.
The cast is fantastic. My favourite is Regina King as Lydia. She's a tough cop but she also has her mother living with her and trouble dating because not many men want to go out with a police detective. It's great to see how she handles all this and still does her job so well.
But it’s also great to see her with the teenage crime witness and talk to the mother of a murder victim that’s now a cold case. The interaction between the cops and the victims of the crimes is incredibly well done.
The Bridge is more of a procedural, often looking into cops accused of crimes because the main character, Frank Leo (played by the terrific Aaron Douglas), is head of the police union. Sometimes the cops are actually guilty of crimes, sometimes not.
We were working on the script for an episode about a cop who loses his gun when Southland aired an episode about a cop who loses his gun. Of course, it’s handled quite differently, but it made us wonder what was in the air.
The final episode of the first season of The Bridge will have one of the best car chases a TV show has ever had. The final epsisode of the first season of Southland features a one-car car chase that’s one of the most tense two minutes of TV ever.
Once we got over the Sgt. Pepper moment and the similarities we were able to sit back and enjoy Southland. It’s a writer’s show, the same way Mad Men is a writer’s show. Complicated characters, layered plots and no easy answers.
The new season of Southland starts October 23rd on NBC but you can watch highlights from the first season on the excellent website right now if you live in the USA. In Canada CTV hasn’t put anything online yet.
As far as I know right now, CBS plans to start advertising The Bridge during the NFL playoffs in January and start airing the show sometime in the week following the Super Bowl. I think there's enough room on network TV for two shows about the inner workings of a big city police department.
Here's a trailer for The Bridge:
John McFetridge
The story goes that when the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper and the Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in June 1967 every other musician working on an album stopped and reconsidered everything they were doing. The Rolling Stones quickly put together Their Satanic Majesties Request, often called the least representative album of all the Stones’ work (I still like “She’s a Rainbow,” but that’s the only song from that album anyone’s likely to hear these days).
One version of the story is here, if you're interested:http://www.icons.org.uk/theicons/collection/sgt-pepper/features/reactions-to-sergeant-peppery
Apparently Brian Wilson was working on the album Smile for the Beach Boys (the follow-up to Pet Sounds) when he heard Sgt. Pepper and stopped everything. Smile finally came out in 2003.
This year I was one of the writers on a new cop show, The Bridge, when Southland premiered.
We had a Sgt. Pepper moment in the writers’ room.
Not as drastic as Brian Wilson’s, no one put a sandbox in their living room (as far as I know) and we finished writing all our scripts on time, but Southland was different enough from other cop shows on TV and similar enough to The Bridge for us to talk about non-stop every day after an episode aired.
There are a lot of things about Southland that to talk about. The look of the show is incredible, especially for a network show – it looks like a cable show and it sounds like one, with plenty of the dialogue bleeped out (of course the difference between a cable and network show is more than just swearing, nudity and fewer viewers). The subject matter is terrific. It’s not just the usual cop stories of bad-bad guys and flawed cops. It’s not a procedural interviewing witnesses and getting lab reports until the crime is solved. It goes deeper into everyone’s lives – cops and criminals and victims and people just caught in the middle.
The cast is fantastic. My favourite is Regina King as Lydia. She's a tough cop but she also has her mother living with her and trouble dating because not many men want to go out with a police detective. It's great to see how she handles all this and still does her job so well.
But it’s also great to see her with the teenage crime witness and talk to the mother of a murder victim that’s now a cold case. The interaction between the cops and the victims of the crimes is incredibly well done.
The Bridge is more of a procedural, often looking into cops accused of crimes because the main character, Frank Leo (played by the terrific Aaron Douglas), is head of the police union. Sometimes the cops are actually guilty of crimes, sometimes not.
We were working on the script for an episode about a cop who loses his gun when Southland aired an episode about a cop who loses his gun. Of course, it’s handled quite differently, but it made us wonder what was in the air.
The final episode of the first season of The Bridge will have one of the best car chases a TV show has ever had. The final epsisode of the first season of Southland features a one-car car chase that’s one of the most tense two minutes of TV ever.
Once we got over the Sgt. Pepper moment and the similarities we were able to sit back and enjoy Southland. It’s a writer’s show, the same way Mad Men is a writer’s show. Complicated characters, layered plots and no easy answers.
The new season of Southland starts October 23rd on NBC but you can watch highlights from the first season on the excellent website right now if you live in the USA. In Canada CTV hasn’t put anything online yet.
As far as I know right now, CBS plans to start advertising The Bridge during the NFL playoffs in January and start airing the show sometime in the week following the Super Bowl. I think there's enough room on network TV for two shows about the inner workings of a big city police department.
Here's a trailer for The Bridge:
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